A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [4]
It was after eleven when Fifi finally got home. Her mother came rushing out into the hall at the sound of the key in the door.
In the last two or three years people had begun remarking that Fifi was growing to look just like her mother. It was a compliment as Clara was a very pretty woman who looked much younger than her forty-four years. They were both tall, slender, blonde-haired and brown-eyed, with heart-shaped faces. But Fifi fervently hoped she would never inherit her mother’s nature, for she flared up at nothing and could say such nasty, spiteful things, which were mainly directed at Fifi.
‘Wherever have you been?’ Clara asked, her eyes narrowed with suspicion and irritation. ‘Carol’s been on the phone asking why you weren’t at Carwardines to meet her. I was really beginning to worry about you as it is such a cold night.’
‘I rang her office and left a message for her,’ Fifi lied. ‘I suppose no one told her.’
‘What was so sudden and important you had to let her down? Carol’s such a nice girl,’ Clara said tersely.
Fifi had her head so far up in the clouds after the evening with Dan that she hadn’t even considered thinking up a plausible story for when she got home. She certainly couldn’t tell the truth – her mother would have fifty fits if she thought she’d been picked up by a strange man.
‘It was Hugh,’ she said hastily, hanging up her coat on the hall stand. ‘He rang me this morning and seemed in a bit of a state. I felt I had to meet him.’
Hugh was an old boyfriend who lived in Bath. Fifi’s parents had liked him a great deal and probably hoped she’d marry him because he was doing his articles with a law firm and came from a very good family. They had split up just after Fifi’s twenty-first birthday, over a year ago, but had remained friends. So she didn’t think it was too terrible to use him as an alibi.
‘What was the matter with him?’
Clara always used this deeply suspicious tone with Fifi. Patty, Peter or Robin could get away with just about anything, but for some unfathomable reason Clara always seemed to think the worst of her eldest child.
‘Oh, just a girl who’s messing him around,’ Fifi said lightly. ‘We had a couple of drinks and some supper. He was more cheerful when I left him. I’ll phone Carol in the morning and explain; it’s too late now.’
‘You could have phoned me,’ her mother snapped.
Fifi sighed. ‘I didn’t know Carol hadn’t got the message. So why would I phone you? I wasn’t expected home.’
‘Most girls still living at home would let their mothers know where they were in case of an emergency. You treat this place like a hotel and your father and me as if we were caretakers.’
Fifi rolled her eyes at the same old line her mother trotted out with monotonous regularity. ‘Mum, I’m tired and cold. I’m sorry I didn’t phone you, that Carol didn’t get my message and for anything else I may have done to upset you. Now may I go to bed?’
Clara Brown turned and flounced back to the sitting room without so much as a goodnight. Fifi went straight upstairs, fervently hoping Patty was already asleep, as she didn’t fancy another interrogation.
Fifi had made Dan laugh that night telling him just how difficult she’d been as a child, and she had no doubt he thought she was exaggerating. But in fact she’d played the truth down. It wasn’t only that she was so strange-looking; she knew her parents had been seriously worried for a time that her peculiar behaviour was caused by a mental deficiency. She couldn’t sit still or concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes; she threw tantrums and could scream for hours. She either stared balefully at people in complete silence, or she was firing personal questions at them. She didn’t mix well with other children; she snatched their toys and pinched their arms or legs. She wouldn’t eat or sleep and she talked to herself.
It hadn’t helped that Patty, who was only fourteen months